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Open Source Development With CVS

Posted on March 24th, 2006

This is a set of free, online chapters about using CVS (Concurrent Versions System) for collaboration and version control. It covers everything from CVS installation and basic concepts all the way to advanced usage and administration. It is intended for anyone who uses or plans to use CVS.

Description

If you’ve never used CVS (or any version control system) before, it’s easy to get tripped up by some of its underlying assumptions. What seems to cause the most initial confusion about CVS is that it is used for two apparently unrelated purposes: record keeping and collaboration. It turns out, however, that these two functions are closely connected.

Record keeping became necessary because people wanted to compare a program’s current state with how it was at some point in the past. For example, in the normal course of implementing a new feature, a developer may bring the program into a thoroughly broken state, where it will probably remain until the feature is mostly finished. Unfortunately, this is just the time when someone usually calls to report a bug in the last publicly released version. To debug the problem (which may also exist in the current version of the sources), the program has to be brought back to a useable state.